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What's up with FUTO? (drewdevault.com)
submitted 1 month ago by Ephera@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[-] TootSweet@lemmy.world 90 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

They're openly disdainful of all things Open Source and OSI, and their software is not Open Source.

They're a fully for-profit company using consumer rights kind of rhetoric to manipulate people in service to FUTO's own pocketbook. Don't fall for their use of the .org tld or promises to "never abuse customers".

I've written many times about what assholes FUTO is. I'm fully convinced they're way more part of the problem than part of the solution and they're not to be trusted.

They've soured me on Rossman. Back when he was doing coverage of things like the court cases around right to repair and tractors and stuff, I watched a few videos of his and thought he was awesome. And then he got involved with FUTO and started billing Grayjay as "Open Source" and I've gotten sufficiently disillusioned with FUTO that I haven't followed Rossman at all. I've got coworkers changing their avatars to Clippy and shit, and I believe their hearts are in the right place, but I can't in good conscience really get behind anything or anyone associated with FUTO.

Edit: Oh. I honesty didn't even see this OP was a link to an article. Lol. Now I'm very interested to go read that article.

Edit 2: Shite. I've now read the article. I knew FUTO was assholes in a lot of different ways, but now I know how deeply, completely irredeemable they really are.

[-] dustyData@lemmy.world 72 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Why does every mobile keyboard developer have some controversial shit? I just want to text in peace.

[-] kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 1 month ago

Anything on HeliBoard too?

[-] dustyData@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago

The only thing I dislike of heliboard is their swipe function requires Google binaries. Most FOSS keyboards either lack some feature I use or are immersed in wild controversies.

[-] uninvitedguest@piefed.ca 8 points 1 month ago

And the implementation is nowhere as good as gboard.

Futo's keyboard isn't much better for slide to type. I find myself switching keyboards back to gboard when I'm not using voice to text or two thumbs.

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[-] amearb@discuss.tchncs.de 22 points 1 month ago

Does FlorisBoard have controversial shit too?

[-] dustyData@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month ago

No, but they are forever beta. They still lack a ton of features I use.

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[-] sga@piefed.social 7 points 1 month ago

fossify keyboard? extremely basic, but works

[-] diffaldo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago

May I recommend Thumbkey its awesome and a bit different from other keyboards. Its concept is interesting ✨

[-] balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It looks neat but what an absolutely stupid take from a keyboard author

Because it trusts you to write what you meant to write.

Butch if I didn't let it correct me I'd have to actually mook st the keyboard and who the fuck wants to do thatm.

Phones are tiny and humans are clumsy. I absolutely never mean what I type, as you can see above.

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[-] arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 59 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Wolf also was spouting about how great Trump is and how "woke" shit is ruining society or whatever in January IIRC. I briefly trawled through their social media when I was investigating their keyboard, Grayjay, and Immich and promptly decided to never, ever give them money.

Note that their keyboard doesn't require network (at least as of now), so if you don't give them money or promote it to other people, they don't really benefit.

EDIT: Also, there are claims Rossman has a Kiwi Farms account and is at least somewhat active there. I haven't investigated those very thoroughly though.

[-] turtl@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 month ago
[-] arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 28 points 1 month ago

Interestingly, according to one of his recent-ish comments, he left FUTO in February.

[-] Static_Rocket@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

Yeah, not sure how much he's distancing himself from FUTO related things though. He brought up grayjay recently, but only specifically to talk about the devs comments on recent Texas app store legislation. Kind of a wash.

Given he is playing politician now, I don't think he's going to make a public statement about it. Not only would it hurt his influence but it would probably stall out any ongoing negotiations regarding right to repair. Shit sucks in general.

[-] prex@aussie.zone 13 points 1 month ago

JFC can there be nothing pure in this world?

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[-] doeknius_gloek@discuss.tchncs.de 53 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I've always had a weird feeling about FUTO, but I thought them giving money to open source projects can't be that bad. Now I hope they don't fuck up Immich.

[-] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 month ago

Luckily thanks to their licensing model they basically cannot. Immich has according to github as of now 1606 contributors. Changing the license so that there could even be a proprietary fork would require basically the ok by every contributor (that made a relevant code contribution)

[-] Ferk@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

And even if they did somehow manage to get permission to switch the license, all previous versions would still be open in perpetuity so a fork would come easily. Immich source isn't only open, and not only GPL.. but AGPL-3.0 which is as copyleft as you can get.

[-] kureta@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 month ago

Thank God! That's a relief. I thought I was going to have to redo my entire photo library hosting stuff.

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[-] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 38 points 1 month ago

Son of a BITCH! I'm so fucking tired of this... Everywhere you look you gotta examine EVERYTHING about a company/group because they might be fascists now...I love Grayjay, it was working so great and I loved the proclaimed mission...I was even trying to get FCast to work since I lost casting ability when I moved to Linux...

I'm just gonna take a break over here for a bit.

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[-] wax@feddit.nu 32 points 1 month ago

FUTO is also involved with Immich 🫤

[-] Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 9 points 1 month ago

They just bragged with v2 release how they "survived the controversial move to join FUTO" ...

I love Immich & use it a lot :(.

[-] dev_null@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 month ago

Try Ente Photos, I like it more.

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[-] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

EDIT: Apparently louis left futo some number of months ago, thank you to another user for letting me know in a reply below

This is informative, and unfortunate.

I will be honest, I don't really expect louis will wade into this issue at all, since he seems to be very uncomfortable with any of the "political" or partisan aspects of the issues he covers.

I can empathize with why one might be that way, but I hope I'm wrong, it would be rather disappointing.

Maybe it's time for me to open some feature requests on the helicopter repo for futo keyboard features I'd really miss if I left it behind... It'd be good for both projects to be feature rich and competitive anyway

[-] MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 month ago

He's not uncomfortable with it - He hates the cognitive dissonance of being a capitalist and hating the results of it

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[-] dabe@lemmy.zip 24 points 1 month ago

Maybe Louis Rossman will see this and beat FUTO back into shape? Maybe? Please? I just want one good outcome here!!

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[-] MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works 23 points 1 month ago

FUTO is more or less openly fascists

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[-] seraphine 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

WHY. GODDAMN WHY is it lately that any organization behind products i like turn out to be extreme assholes? we're on a streak atm i feel like

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[-] demizerone@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago

Aw man I knew there was something wrong here. I gave them money for the keyboard and the voice talk and immich bcz I was a Rossman fan. They played him and me. Fuck these fascists.

[-] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 month ago

Gross. Fuck FUTO.

[-] _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

FFS, so what's a keyboard that isn't shitty and invasive?

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[-] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 15 points 1 month ago

I've always been an outspoken skeptic of FUTO (check post history) and their bizarre campaign against free software, but I didn't know they were this bad. Yikes

[-] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 13 points 1 month ago

God fucking damnit. I just like the on device speech-to-text functionality. Anyone have any recs for another service that does the same thing.

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[-] drdiddlybadger@pawb.social 13 points 1 month ago

Oh god dammit man.

[-] kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 month ago

Great article.

[-] deathbird@mander.xyz 10 points 1 month ago

I'm going to stop using good free software because I read a blog post by a sketchy guy saying the guys that wrote the software are sketchy. 🙄

No material harm is described in the post. This is a drama blog.

[-] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 18 points 1 month ago

"good" is subjective but FUTO's software is non-free. Their attempts to openwash their proprietary license is enough of a red flag.

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[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago

Believe what you want, but Drew DeVault has more of a reputation than FUTO.

[-] balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Sorry but this person is treating grapheneos' attacks on other groups as legitimate which throws the entire article into question. If they are happy to provide a platform for graphene's founder's paranoid conspiracies I can't trust the content.

Seems clear there's some questionable shit going on, but the only evidence presented is two YouTube videos which isn't actually a lot. I wouldn't be surprised based on this to hear there are deeper links, but this article is written by someone who thinks tweets and YouTube comments are evidence.

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[-] Catalyst_A@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago

Shit I really liked them. Their keyboard is incredible and Grayjay is hard to replace on desktop. But I'll get started on replacing them. Any ideas on a good keyboard that's open-source? Not anysoftkeyboard or mantis. Tried them.

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[-] khaleer@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 month ago

There we go, farawell grayjay then!

[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl 6 points 1 month ago

Yarvin has proclaimed that black people are genetically predisposed to a lower IQ than white people

The second part of that is true, because the IQ test is unreliable. That's why its banned in California schools for POC

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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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